Pat Howard: Data shows Erie region drifting in wrong direction

ERIE, Pa. -- One of the central rebukes of the Erie region's public policy and prospects is a number that hasn't changed much in a long time.

Erie County's population, about 280,000, has been roughly flat for decades. It's better than declining, I suppose, but that's cold comfort.

Couple that with another number, the city of Erie's population, which has plummeted during that same time span. At just over 101,000, the city is flirting with falling below six digits for the first time since 1920.

"Any city that isn't growing is dying," Allentown Mayor Ed Pawlowski said when new census figures were released in 2011. Allentown is growing.

A new demographic profile from the Erie County Department of Health lays out some more numbers to worry about. It found that the median age of Erie County residents increased from 36.2 years in 2000 to 38.8 years in 2012, the highest on record.

The underlying details are even more striking. The number of residents under age 45 decreased by 9.3 percent over the same period, while the population of people 45 and older increased 16 percent.

The Department of Health's profile also reprised the county's dismal poverty statistics. And it points out the problem isn't contained to inner-city Erie.

The city has the biggest and most visible concentration of poor people, but there are others. The profile set the city's poverty rate at 26.1 percent, with Edinboro (24.9 percent), North East Borough (24.9 percent), the city of Corry (24.5 percent) and Platea Borough (21.9 percent) not doing much better.

These demographics stand as measures of our region's well-being and perhaps predictors of its future. You don't need a crystal ball to see that a flat, rapidly aging population and deeply entrenched poverty don't bode well.

These and other troubling trend lines have been enabled by a political culture that's been chronically incapable of shaking off the corrosive inertia reflected in the data. And all of Pennsylvania's cities, and by extension its metropolitan areas, are hamstrung by a county and municipal structure that rewards local turf politics and rivalries instead of coordinated regional strategies.

It's telling in that regard that some of the most cohesive and targeted drives to attack some of our region's fundamental problems are being led not by the political class, but by nonprofits such as the Erie Community Foundation and the United Way of Erie County. It's encouraging that those efforts to move the needle are accompanied by a commitment to measuring the results.

There were stirrings of a different kind of politics and vision early in the last decade amid the splashy release of the Bosworth report and its recommendations for bold, transformational change. But they soon gave way to the fizzling of the Civic Coordinating Committee, the mechanism created to broker that change, and the parallel implosions of the administrations of then-Mayor Rick Filippi and then-County Executive Rick Schenker.

There's no point in rehashing Filippi's fall at this remove, except to recall that in a lot of ways he really got what the city and region are up against and showed a willingness to challenge the status quo. Then scandal drowned him out, and there hasn't been a fresh, bold idea out of City Hall since.

The insular, sluggish administration of Mayor Joe Sinnott replaced the tumult of Filippi with Sinnott's version of steady as she goes. For two terms Sinnott has been pitching a steadily deteriorating stasis as progress, when he bothers to pitch anything at all, and there's no reason to expect something different in the next four years.

County Executive Barry Grossman and his allies took a run at changing the paradigm with their failed attempt to establish a community college, which was part of Bosworth's prescription. That missed opportunity to offer a more accessible and affordable means up the economic ladder came in the face of data that shows Erie County lagging in educational achievement.

County Councilman Phil Fatica captured the disconnect in explaining his vote in favor of the community college as an unwillingness to merely "manage our decline." Democratic county executive nominee Kathy Dahlkemper has picked up that theme in her campaign.

It's not just a turn of phrase. You can track it in the county Department of Health's data and other objective measures of the region's well-being.

Those numbers add up to trouble. And more of the same will make it worse.